Hey look, it’s E-merl 8.0! Everything’s gone a bit wider and more colourful, hasn’t it? And what’s that? Why, it appears to be brand new, twice-weekly webcomic serial, Dice With The Universe. Picking up the baton from the recently completed MASIVO, Dice will be updating every Tuesday and Friday. But unlike… well, just about every serial I’ve done before, Dice will need you (yes, you!) to take a hand in determining what transpires each week.

Meanwhile in other news… there is no other news I can tell you. Yet. While it looks like I’ve got a very exciting and rather busy 2014 ahead of me, I’ve been thoroughly sworn to secrecy about the lot of it. So! Vague hints it is! In the year to come look out for a second webcomic serial to debut at E-merl, a new comics installation to be exhibited somewhere in London, a discussion panel 12 years in the making and the announcement of a major new digital comics research project. Comics! Excitement! Vagueness! Yay!

Time for an autumnal news update, don’t you think? Starting off with an upcoming event – Thought Bubble 2013 will soon be upon us and I’m going to be there, sharing table 149 with Mr Noble. Debuting at the show will be not one, but two new issues of Necessary Monsters: Murderbox by myself and my esteemed colleague, Mr Azzopardi. Also at the show will be Mr Miers and his fascinating Score & Script anthology, which just so happens to contains new strips by both myself and Mr. Noble. Why not bring your freshly-purchased copy along to our table and enjoy the bout of fisticuffs that will no doubt ensue as we attempt to settle which of the strips is the finer.

Remember my gallery comic, Black Hats In Hell? I mentioned it in a news post a little way down the page? No? Well then allow me to direct you towards two aide-mémoires. Firstly, the comic has had the good fortune to be featured in Paul Gravett‘s new book, Comics Art. Part of Tate Publishing’s Contemporary Art series, the book presents a fascinating tour of the medium that I’d recommend to everyone as thoroughly worth checking out. Secondly, I’ve now completed my own write up on Black Hats, in the shape of an academic paper entitled Images In Space. Based on the talk I gave at Oxford in September, the paper examines the comic alongside other architecturally mediated works and tries to get at what makes this subset of comics tick. Take a peek and let me know what you think via the twitters or, even better, in person at Thought Bubble next weekend.

Despite the unprecedented outbreak of summer, production has not slowed in the E-merl comic factories. Freshly unleashed on the public is my new game/comic hybrid, Icarus Needs. Folks may remember the game’s protagonist, Icarus Creeps from his appearance in a couple of previoustales here at E-merl. For those interested in getting some further insight into the ideas behind the game, I’ve popped up a pdf copy of the Game Comics talk I gave last month at the Joint International Graphic Novel and Bande Dessinées Conference in Glasgow.

Hello Internet! Four quick bursts of news for you on this fine Thursday evening.

One: At the end of May I released a free-to-play browser version of A Duck Has An Adventure over on Kongregate. Anyone who hasn’t had a chance to play Duck on Android can now hop over there to try it out. The game has proved quite popular so far, scooping Kongregate’s Game Of The Week and racking up over 300,000 plays so far. Also, oddities like this page of YouTube play-throughs and some lovelyreviews. Thanks Internet!

Two: The Necessary Monsters website has now relocated to NecessaryMonsters.net and morphed into an Etsy shop. Not only can you purchase the original graphic novel there, you can also pick up the first two issues of Necessary Monsters 2: Murderbox. It’s the same great mix of spy-horror thrills, only this time with a soupçon more James Bond and Hellraiser thrown into the mix.

Three: The Iron Man 2020 serial I wrote for Marvel Comics has now been collected alongside other tales of Arno Stark into a lovely little trade paperback. Available in all good comic stories or via your local Amazon dot whatever.

So I have a pretty insanely busy April ahead of me. So busy that I have now decided to name the next few weeks as The Official 2013 E-merl Spring Tour. Wooo! The centrepiece of the tour will be my new hypercomic installation called Black Hats In Hell that will be opening at two – count ’em, two! – different locations this month. On the 15th April I will be taking over the Postgraduate Gallery at the University Of Hertfordshire with the initial installation of the comic, which has been designed specifically to make use of unique shape of the gallery space.

Then on the 19th of April I will be installing a new, site-specific remix of the comic outside the Platform Theatre at Central St Martins in London. This second version will incorporate collaborative digressions made by some of the students at CSM and features as part of the Comica festival taking place that weekend. I’ll be there in person on Saturday the 20th April as part of the Comica Comiket and would love to hear attendees feedback about the work.

But my travels in April do not stop there! I’m also hitting the conference circuit and will be delivering two papers across three conferences without the aid of a safety net or, probably, any reasonable amount of sleep. The hijinks begin on April 3rd when I’ll be delivering a paper entitled “Comics Are Control” as part of the Adventures In Textuality conference at the University Of Sunderland. Then a week later on April 10th I’ll be at the opposite end of the country at the University of Sussex delivering a paper on Game Comics as part of their Tablet Syposium.

For the Spring Tour’s grand finale I’ll be popping across to Germany from April 23rd to 26th in order to deliver an expanded version of my Game Comics paper at the Change & Continuity Symposium as part of the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film. If any of you are in any of those places at the same time I am in those places you should probably say “hi.” And then you should probably buy me a drink because, if I have actually managed to succeed in meeting all those deadlines, then I am certainly going to be in need of one.

Secondly, myself and the aforementioned reprobates are also amongst the contributors to the Score & Script exhibition opening in London next week at the Centre For Recent Drawing. Much kudos to John Miers for coming up with the whole concept and then inviting us all to take part. Should be some fascinating works of comics on show – I know I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what my fellow contributors have come up with.

Thirdly, A Duck Has An Adventure has been short listed for the New Media Writing Prize. Wooo! Also: Quack! You can see all the short listed entrants here and even vote for your favourite in the People’s Choice Prize (hint: choose the one with ducks in). The awards themselves will take place in Bournemouth on the evening of 28th November and you’re more than welcome to come along if it sounds like your cup of tea.

Two exciting things are happening! One: Sean and I have finished the first issue of Necessary Monsters 2! Very exciting! NM2: Murderbox picks up right where volume one left off and features more spy-horror thrills than you can shake a severed limb at. Those in the UK wanting to get their hands on a copy will be able to pick up issue one at MCM in October or Thought Bubble in November. For US readers interested in checking out the new series, I direction your attention towards the following paragraph.

Second exciting thing: I am going to be at New York Comic Con with First Comics! Very, very exciting! First Comics will be at booth #1624 and I’ll be on hand with copies of Necessary Monsters, Murderbox, Brain Fist and a full-colour, con exclusive issue of All Knowledge Is Strange. I should be about for all four days of the convention, so do stop by the booth to say hello. Karol and I will be in New York from 8th October, so if you’re someone I know in the NYC area and you want to meet up before the show, drop me a mail to merlin (at) e-merl.com and plans will be made.

Oh! Additional sort-of-exciting-but-probably-more-just-kinda-interesting thing I should mention: the paper I delivered at The Graphic Novel Conference in Oxford on the history of the hypercomic is now available to read online over here. Special thanks to Neal Von Flue, whose assistance with the paper was invaluable.

Welcome to the newly nipped and tucked E-merl 7.1! The star of the site’s new look is of course MASIVO, my new twice-weekly webcomic serial. Ever since I was a kid I’ve had a soft spot for giant robots punching each other and at last in MASIVO I’ve found a suitable outlet for this guilty sci-fi pleasure. Stay tuned to E-merl every Monday and Friday to watch the inevitable carnage unfold.

In addition to the site’s lovely new colour scheme, I’ve re-organised the top navigation bar to reflect the renewed focus on hypercomics that’s come along thanks to my current doctoral studies. Expect more new work from me in this area before the year is out. Not to be outdone, my major webcomic serials have also finally been given their own page and a fancy drop down menu to make finding them all a little bit easier.

Meanwhile, over in the right hand bar, you can now see my latest tweet and if you scroll down a bit I’ve added a subscription button for those wishing to receive an e-mail whenever the site updates. Elsewhere I’ve also updated the Consulting page to reflect a couple of my recent gigs, chief amongst which would be the creation of the Strangebook prototype, which you can learn more about here.

And that’s pretty much everything for this update. I think I’ve caught and squished all the bugs thrown up by the site’s facelift, but if anyone spots anything that looks like an error then a comment on the bottom of this post would be much appreciated. Right, back to the giant robot craziness. Toodles!

Hey everybody in Chicago! I am going to Chicago! In about… 12 hours from now, in fact. This coming weekend I’ll be attending C2E2 (The Chicago Comics & Entertainment Expo) as a guest of First Comics alongside my Necessary Monsters compatriot, Sean Azzopardi.

Stop by the First Comics booth to say hello. If you want to be absolutely guaranteed of finding me at the booth, try 2pm-3pm Friday, 11am-12pm Saturday or 2pm-3pm Sunday, as that’s when Sean and I will be doing our signings.

And if you are a human person who I know who also knows me and you’re going to be in Chicago during the next week, drop me a mail or a tweet so we can arrange drinking and such. Right! Off to get some sleep before my flight. Chicago! Yeah!

A Duck Has An Adventure is my new hypercomic adventure game for Android phones and pads. The game challenges you to discover all the different possible lives one duck could live, from adventures on the high seas to the halls of academia and beyond. It also features a quite splendid array of hats, as all good games should.

You can grab A Duck Has An Adventure from the Android store right now for only 99 cents (or 66 pence or 75… er… euro cents). It’s taken me about six months to create, contains over 450 panels and is, I think, a significant enough chunk of digital comics to be well worth paying for. For iPhone and iPad users I’m hoping to also have an iOS version of Duck out later in the year, so please keep an eye on E-merl for future waterfowl-related announcements.